For adults, yes. I'm not yet convinced we're able to raise healthy children without a little meat, and if we collectively scaled back to eating meat once a week

For adults, yes. I'm not yet convinced we're able to raise healthy children without a little meat, and if we collectively scaled back to eating meat once a week it wouldn't matter how many of us are vegetarian or vegan. I see animals as individuals and as people. I grew up on and around family farms (for sustenance, not profit). I'd rather we had less of The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) and more of everyone at least witnessing the butchering of the animals they'll be eating. I wish I'd gotten on a fishing boat at some point when I was younger. I'm trying out eating three times a week (not a magic number, just what I've settled on for now), and now that I'm used to it I want the food I eat to be the best we have--fresh land greens, less-fresh sea greens, fruits and vegetables, whole grains (oat groats, wheat berries, etc.), local eggs, and definitely-not-local sardines, mackerel, and oysters because I love seafood and my child's pediatrician says the omega-3s are good for a child's brain development (and no, I don't impose this regimen on anyone else in my family--I still make meals and sit down together with my warm salty water). Red meat maybe once a month, maybe. Delicious bacon a few times a year. Mostly chicken, eggs, fish, and butter when I eat animal products. I'm not wasting my eating time with anything sweet or "deliciously processed" because it doesn't feel good afterwards and is not as nutritious as the other stuff (this after half a lifetime of snacking on sweet foods, prepackaged and homemade). I know fungus can supply some things meat otherwise would, like cyanocobalamin (B12, I think). I like nutritional yeast for that. Feel free to refute and/or add to any of this mostly emotion-based perspective--I'm still learning.